‘Communion Town’ by Sam Thompson, and More

By DANA JENNINGS

December 25, 2013

This month, a novel that conjures an imaginary city, an elegant book of poems complemented by haunting paintings, two dark collections of short stories where nothing is as it seems, and two rugged graphic novels with enjoyably ragged edges.

The nameless city in Sam Thompson’s fine first novel, “Communion Town,” is “a world of gray dawn twilight and blackened stone above, rainwater dripping from the girders.” Monsters skulk amid the rubblescapes, dread is the flavor of the day. Each chapter in the novel, longlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, is told by a different character, in a different genre. And each unspools like a pitch-perfect improvisation: on Kafka, gothic horror, the serial-killer tale. In episodes that have the depth and texture of novels, Mr. Thompson builds his cryptic city of abridged lives — but time is his truest protagonist. Ordinary time doesn’t pass; it accumulates like soot and rust. As one character says in “Gallathea,” a Möbius strip of a noir: “Time is strange. In certain rooms, you have to be careful how you leave, or you might meet yourself coming back.”

To enter the beguilingly allusive and elusive “Correspondences” is to again be a child holed up under the kitchen table, straining to hear the grown-ups murmur. The poet Anne Michaels’s seductive and ethereal voice summons the spirits of writers who weathered — or didn’t — the ravages of the 20th century, like Paul Celan, Fernando Pessoa, Anna Akhmatova, Primo Levi and more. Bernice Eisenstein’s haunted paintings of the writers are paired with brief quotations from them and others. (Bruno Schulz: “Could it be that time is too narrow for all events?”) This stunning book, with its accordion design, can be read forward or backward, making it feel like a new book each time it’s opened. “Correspondences” is a conversation between Ms. Eisenstein and Ms. Michaels, between them and the writers conjured, among the dead themselves — and with the reader.

This Tilt-a-Whirl of a graphic novel is a perfect example of the Elmore Leonard writing rule, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip” — and that’s to the credit of both Darwyn Cooke and Richard Stark (a pseudonym for the crime writer Donald Westlake). “Slayground” is Mr. Cooke’s fourth adaptation of a Parker novel, and it meets his previous high standards. The setup is simple but elegant, the execution excellent: An armored-car heist goes wrong, and the book’s antihero, Parker, is forced to hole up in a closed amusement park (midwinter, Buffalo, 1969) as he tries to duck a rabid pack of gunsels, kingpins and crooked cops. The story and talk are crisp, and the graphics sure. Mr. Cooke always lets action speak louder than words. And there’s a delightful highlight in this well-designed book: a foldout map of Fun Island, “the Happiest Place in the World” — though Parker might disagree.

The short story is Caitlin R. Kiernan’s laboratory, a sanctum where she can rain arcane powders on an idea, crank up the literary Bunsen burner and see what happens. In “The Ape’s Wife,” what happens is often wonderful. There are a few experiments that fail, but well over half of the stories are first rate, as Ms. Kiernan roves from Lovecraftian awe to straight-up science fiction. The best include: “The Steam Dancer (1896),” a confluence of steampunk, striptease and Pygmalion — “She is muscle and skin, steel and artifice”; the title story, an alternate vision of King Kong and his beloved; and “The Sea Troll’s Daughter,” a recasting of Beowulf in which the hero is a woman and the saved are ingrates. As you read, you may feel like one of the narrators here, who says, “I did start out believing the truths of the universe were knowable.” But that was before you entered Ms. Kiernan’s crepuscular lab.

SNAPSHOTBy Andy Diggle and Jock104 pages. Image Comics. $12.99.

“Snapshot,” a smart, well-drawn take on the conspiracy thriller, is a Tarantino-tinted B-movie disguised as a graphic novel. The writer Andy Diggle and the artist Jock, who created the comic book that inspired the 2010 action movie “The Losers,” tell the story of Jake Dobson, a clerk at a comics shop, who finds a cellphone that harbors grisly photos of an apparent murder. Then things really get weird. Dobson becomes enmeshed in a plot in which a hit man is on his trail, the dead won’t stay dead, and secrets are common currency. Heady stuff for Dobson, who explains: “I sell comic books and action figures. I play video games. I don’t kill people.” “Snapshot” manages to satirize both high-frequency stock trading and Occupy Wall Street, as Mr. Diggle keeps the story hurtling ahead — though the dialogue could’ve been even more spare — and Jock’s stark black-and-white drawings provide expressionistic pleasure on each page.

Short-story collections are often like crushes. They bellow to life like a blowtorch at the start with their best stories, but soon fizzle. And that’s the case with Susie Moloney’s “Things Withered,” 13 tales (mostly) from the dark heart of suburbia. The best of these stories are a likable mash-up of “Desperate Housewives” and “The Twilight Zone,” featuring refreshingly strong and rounded female characters. There are compelling tales of office politics and witchcraft (“The Windemere”) and shockingly fatal paper cuts (“The Audit”), but the middle of the book sometimes lapses into a kind of bland Horror and Garden TV. After those becalmed waters, the final story is its best. “The Neighbourhood, or, to the Devil With You” churns with murderous suburban grudges and jealousy. It opens, “I don’t remember when it was I started hating Hazel Kummel, but I do remember the moment I realized that I did.” That could be the coda for the whole collection.